BURA Collection:http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/2072018-02-13T01:14:40Z2018-02-13T01:14:40ZMechanicism as science and ideology: Hobbe's epistemological revolution in civil scienceBardin, Andreahttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/138002017-01-07T03:00:41Z2015-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Mechanicism as science and ideology: Hobbe's epistemological revolution in civil science
Authors: Bardin, Andrea
Abstract: In the seventeenth century a new science of motion emerged that later developed into what we call today classical mechanics. The epistemology of early modern mechanics was split between technical experimentation and mathematical formalisation. ‘Mechanicism’, Cartesianism in primis, was a philosophical project to both preserve the theoretical and technical efficacy of this science and integrate it into a new world picture. In this historical context mechanical philosophy therefore played a double role. On the one hand it was part of a revolutionary event opening new frontiers for materialist thought. On the other hand, as a world picture, it originated a new ideological framework for metaphysical dualism. This thesis uses this historical and philosophical background to radically reconsider the political theory of Thomas Hobbes. During the 1640s Hobbes’s scientia civilis progressively incorporated the dualistic epistemology of Descartes’s mechanicism into materialist philosophy by privileging one of the two structural features of modern science: the tendency towards ‘deduction’ rather than experimentation. This philosophical gesture, simultaneously epistemological and ideological, had considerable political consequences. For this reason Hobbes’s political theory will be read as an ideological response to the non-geometrical and non-mechanical functioning of ‘matter’, including ‘human matter’, evidenced by the threatening experimental practices carried on during the first half of the seventeenth century in both the Galilean science of nature and the English Civil War. My wider hypothesis is that this profoundly idealistic agenda still informs our understanding of nature and of the body politic. It reduces the open method of science to the outdated metaphysical picture of it provided by Descartes, and suffocates politics itself by neutralising the emergence of political conflict and experimentation, labelling them as not only inessential but also dangerous to the body politic. On the contrary, philosophical materialism invites us to understand the self-organising tendency of matter as an undeniable risk implicit in the functioning of all systems, the social system included.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2015-01-01T00:00:00ZMarkets, institutions and the Polanyian challenge: A theoretical study of the new institutionalist economic history of Douglass C. NorthKrul, Matthijshttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/135792016-12-07T03:00:56Z2016-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Markets, institutions and the Polanyian challenge: A theoretical study of the new institutionalist economic history of Douglass C. North
Authors: Krul, Matthijs
Abstract: In this study, I examine the New Institutionalist Economic History (NIEH) of Douglass C. North from a historiographical and philosophical perspective. As a point of departure for this purpose I take North’s critical engagement with the primitivism-modernism debate in premodern economic history, as represented in his early work by the ‘challenge of Karl Polanyi’. This challenge, I argue, has given shape to the development of the NIEH in its various stages of theoretical elaboration. Therefore, understanding its contextual significance is indispensable for making sense of North’s oeuvre as a whole. On my reading, North interpreted the challenge of Polanyi to mean combining two methodological conceptions previously not united in one work. On the one hand, North’s NIEH extends the scope of economic theory to the study of the longue durée of economic history; while on the other hand North seeks to theorize the importance of historical variation in sociocultural institutions for understanding why there are rarely complete or well-functioning markets in most of economic history. North considers neoclassical economics suitable for neither of these purposes. Yet his critique of Polanyi’s substantivist-primitivist approach is primarily based on the absence of an integration of his project with the tools of economic theory. For this purpose, North therefore adopted the theory of transaction cost economics, also called New Institutional Economics (NIE), to this new ambitious end. More than perhaps any other author North has been responsible for extending the scope and sophistication of this economics based approach in the study of economic history.
In the present work, I discuss to what extent this approach has been successful in its own aims, internally consistent, and to what extent it is plausible as a historiographical approach from an ‘external’ point of view. I do this by combining a close reading and interpretation of a variety of North’s writings, focusing in particular on the most contemporary version of his work - which has not been much studied - with a methodological and theoretical discussion of various major themes in or aspects of his work from the viewpoints of historiography, anthropology, and philosophy of social science. These themes include (among others) North’s understanding of the functioning of markets in politics and economics, his approach to choice theory, rationality, and game theory, his use or neglect of evolutionary concepts, the meaning of embeddedness in his work, and North’s contractarian anthropology.
As this work shows, North’s NIEH is situated in a difficult intermediate position within larger debates in economic thought: between primitivism and modernism, between substantivism and formalism (in the anthropological sense), and most significantly, between the ‘new mainstream’ of economic theory and the quest for successive endogenisation of the institutional context of economic behavior. This certainly speaks for the ambition and sophistication of North’s historiographical approach, something which has only increased with the further development of his theory. But in his quest to unite the best insights of choice theory with New Institutionalist economics as well as incorporating the ‘anthropological’ level of fully socialized beliefs, preferences, and how they give rise to institutional variation in history, North frequently seeks to have his cake and eat it. The persistent methodological ambiguities in his work give rise to problems of internal consistency and external plausibility, which are present from the very inauguration of his NIEH research programme. The subsequent development of his work has not, I argue, been able to overcome this fundamental problem. For this reason, while much of North’s toolset and his overarching ambitions are valuable developments in economic historical theory, he does not achieve his aim of overcoming the challenge of Karl Polanyi. Without a more decisive break with his original economic microfoundations, North’s NIEH project cannot ultimately live up to its grand ambitions.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2016-01-01T00:00:00Z‘Our Achilles’ Heel’ – Interagency intelligence during the Malayan emergencyArditti, Roger Christopherhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/128422016-06-22T02:00:44Z2016-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: ‘Our Achilles’ Heel’ – Interagency intelligence during the Malayan emergency
Authors: Arditti, Roger Christopher
Abstract: The Malayan Emergency is often considered the defining paradigm for a successful counter-insurgency campaign. The effective collection and management of intelligence by Special Branch dominates this paradigm. However, the intelligence architecture during Emergency was much more complicated than the simple Special Branch-Army nexus upon which existing studies focus. Other components of the intelligence included the Malayan Security Service (MSS), Security Intelligence Far East (SIFE), the Joint Intelligence Committee / Far East (JIC/FE), the Royal Air Force (RAF), the Army, and the mainstream police. Each component adapted to the challenge of insurgency in different ways – the civilian elements faring far worse than the military. Britain struggled to adapt to the post-war intelligence challenges in the Far East. Key intelligence components and capabilities were constituted in haste with overlapping and ambiguous remits. Consequently, there was bitter infighting at a number of levels, particularly between the various civilian intelligence agencies. In contrast, the Army and RAF demonstrated an instinctive ability to work in a ‘joint’ environment from the very beginning of the Emergency. In particular, the RAF took a leading role in creating a joint theatre-level intelligence apparatus which included establishment of a Joint Operations Room in Kuala Lumpur and the Joint Intelligence Photographic Intelligence Committee / Far East. However, the military were unable to provide the comprehensive human intelligence or strategic leadership necessary to make the broader apparatus effective. This could only come once the apparatus led by the civil agencies – chiefly the uniformed police as well as Special Branch – had learnt to adapt to the demands of waging a counter-insurgency campaign. Given that the British intelligence organisations had learnt to function in a joint manner during the Second World War, it is remarkable how much had apparently been forgotten in the three years preceding the outbreak of the Communist 1 AIR 20/7777, Report on the Emergency in Malaya, from April 1950 to November 1951, by Sir Harold Briggs. insurgency in Malaya and how long it took to create an effective method of coordinating intelligence during subsequent Emergency.
Description: This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London2016-01-01T00:00:00ZEisenhower’s parallel track reassessing President Eisenhower’s activism through an analysis of the development of the first US space policyShanahan, Markhttp://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/107372015-05-06T02:02:24Z2014-01-01T00:00:00ZTitle: Eisenhower’s parallel track reassessing President Eisenhower’s activism through an analysis of the development of the first US space policy
Authors: Shanahan, Mark
Abstract: Abstract: Historians of the early space age have established a norm whereby President Eisenhower's actions are judged solely as a response to the launch of the Sputnik satellite, and are indicative of a passive, negative presidency. His low-key actions are seen merely as a prelude to the US triumph in space in the 1960s. This study presents an alternative view showing that Eisenhower’s space policy was not a reaction to the heavily-propagandised Soviet satellite launches, or even the effect they caused in the US political and military elites, but the continuation of a strategic track. In so doing, it also contributes to the reassessment of the wider Eisenhower presidency. Having assessed the development of three intersecting discourses: Eisenhower as president; the genesis of the US space programme; and developments in Cold War US reconnaissance, this thesis charts Eisenhower’s influence both on the ICBM and reconnaissance programmes and his support for a non-military approach to the International Geophysical Year. These actions provided the basis for his space policy for the remainder of his presidency. The following chapters show that Sputnik had no impact on the policies already in place and highlight Eisenhower’s pragmatic activism in enabling the implementation of these policies by a carefully-chosen group of expert ‘helping hands’. This study delivers a new interpretation of Eisenhower’s actions. It argues that he was operating on a parallel track that started with the Castle H-bomb tests; developed through the CIA's reconnaissance efforts and was distilled in the Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. This set a policy for US involvement in outer space that matched Eisenhower’s desire for a balanced budget and fundamental belief in maintaining peace. By challenging the orthodox view, this paper shows that President Eisenhower’s space policy actions were strategic steps that provided a logical next step for both civilian and military space programmes at the completion of the International Geophysical Year
Description: This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University London2014-01-01T00:00:00Z